IT’S the ninth biggest nation on Earth, home to the busiest space port in the world and has an ancient culture based on tribes of roaming horsemen.

But the name that came to the minds of most Scottish football fans when Celtic found out they are off to Kazakhstan to play FC Shakhter Karagandy for a Champions League play-off was – Borat.

The character created by actor Sacha Baron Cohen has become the world’s most famous living (fictional) Kazakh thanks to his TV series and movie.

The parody telly presenter has helped the former Soviet state achieve global fame.

So as the central Asian country prepares to welcome its first Scottish football team we present a Borat Sagdiyev, star man of Glorious Nation Kazakhstan, cut out and keep guide to his country.

Game will probably be moved to Astana Arena

How to Get There

If Celtic fans want to head to Borat’s country to support their side, they might have to shell out up to a million in the local currency to make the trip.

Flights from Glasgow to Karagandy, via London and Minsk, take more than 13 hours and were on sale yesterday for £1551 (via website Skyscanner.com) which is equal to almost 400,000 Kazakh tenge (KZT).

Or it’s roughly the same price to travel from Edinburgh to nearby capital Astana with Turkish Airlines via Istanbul.

The Kazakh government will charge you £50 for a tourist visa, available from their London embassy, which takes five working days to process.

When fans arrive they can check into four star hotels such as the Cosmonaut which have rooms going for around 2100KZT a night, or £90 to your average travelling Scots supporter.

The Attractions

The game may be moved from Karagandy to capital Astana as FC Shakhter’s ground is not up to scratch which would be perfect for fans seeking a bit of culture.

In Astana they can marvel at the Norman Foster built Palace of Peace and Accord – also know as the Pyramid of Peace – a £40million tribute to Kazakh culture and heritage. Foster was also the man behind the Bayterek monument – a 150m statue that represent a poplar tree holding a golden egg.

Population

More than 17million people live in Kazakhstan, which has a landmass almost ten times that of the UK.

The Space Race

Before the Borat movie – which was actually filmed in rural Romania – the country was most famous for its space race heritage. The south of Kazakhstan is home to the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

The mammoth spaceport is where the Sputnik satellite and Yuri Gagarin’s first ever manned spaceflight were launched.

Yuri Gagarin from Kazakhstan was the first man in space (Photo: Getty Images)

It is still one of the hubs of the space age and is home to Soyuz rockets which have carried vital payloads to the international space station since the US grounded their Space Shuttle fleet.

It will also be the site of Scotland’s first ever satellite launch, when Glasgow firm Clyde Space send the UKube-1 into orbit later this year.

Its biggest stars

Its the world of sport and movies that produce Kazakhstan’s biggest names.

The most prominent footballer from Kazakhstan, Heinrich Schmidtgal, plays for Fortuna Dusseldorf in Germany, while cyclist Alexander Vinokourov became the toast of the nation last summer when he defeated the hotly tipped UK team to take road cycling gold at London 2012.

After football, ice hockey is probably the country’s favourite sport, with players such as Andrey Morokov hugely popular.

Film director Timur Bekmambetov is the biggest name in the arts world after making movies such as Wanted, the adaptation of Scottish comic book writer Mark Millar’s series of graphic novels.

Food and drink

The national dish is beshbarmak, which are flat noodles with boiled horsemeat.

Local beers include Karagandinskoye and Derbes, and the travel advice for drinkers wanting to enjoy vodka or local brandy drink konyak, is to check the bottles have a tax label on the cap to make sure they are not bootleg or dangerous.

A much safer option is to try the “other” national drink. The other national drink in Kazakhstan refers to kumiss, a drink made from fermented horse milk – not urine as comrade Borat joked in the film. Very nice.